The women of the Chinese internet remain defiant

 

Despite the arrest and continued interrogation of China's most prominent online feminists, women in the country are continuing to protest against sexism using the internet.

All over the world, feminist political statements are a staple of social media. Consider attention-grabbing pictures of wedding dresses soaked in blood, to protest against domestic violence. Or the male toilets occupied by women - designed to highlight the lack of female facilities. Like many such actions, those protests were designed by savvy activists to get millions of clicks.
But one thing sets these particular examples apart: they were launched on the strictly controlled Chinese internet.
Despite widespread censorship of social media, until recently feminist discussion seemed mostly permitted online in the communist country whose founder Chairman Mao once said that "women hold up half the sky".


But last month, on International Women's Day, the women behind these online protests were arrested, beginning an ordeal of detention and interrogation that led one of them, Wu Rongrong, to post the following words on WeChat earlier this week: "my spirit is on the verge of collapse."
As well as Wu, age 30, the group (dubbed the "Feminist Five") included Li Tingting, age 25; Wei Tingting, age 26; Wang Man, age 33 and Zheng Churan, age 25. They were arrested on charges of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," but haven't yet been prosecuted. Two weeks ago they were released on bail - which means they could be re-interrogated, as Wu has recently been, or detained again.
So does that mean that feminism has now made it onto the list of "sensitive" or proscribed topics suppressed behind China's so-called "Great Firewall"?
After the arrests, the Chinese internet suddenly seemed to go silent on women's issues. "You have to understand these five are not just five, they represent a whole cohort of young feminist activists," says Professor Wang Zheng, a historian of Chinese feminism at the University of Michigan. "So when the five were detained all the others went underground." Women's rights activists, she says, have not been detained in China since 1913.